Aspects of the Russian war machine that many expected to see, but we have yet to observe

Preamble

Today on twitter a very informative thread was posted by Major General Mick Ryan. Because reading an analysis on twitter is a bit more difficult than in an article on LinkedIn, I took the liberty of copy-pasting this thread here in this article. Full credits should be given to

Introduction

It is week 4 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Today Major General Mick Ryan examined those aspects of the Russian war machine that many expected to see, but we have yet to observe, during the war.

What form the next war might take.

In the period between wars, professional military institutions engage in speculation about what form the next war might take. This impetus to change varies. Generally, losers have greater motivation. The German post-WW1 studies and post-Vietnam US Army are examples.

But even victorious militaries have an institutional imperative to explore what success looks like for future operations. This can be to protect institutional budgets, retain political support, or because of changes in the strategic environment (geopolitics, technology, etc)

For the US, the current theme in military modernisation and preparing for the next war is multidomain operations. This has various manifestations in different services.

Russia has described a strategy of active defence. As the Russian Military Strategy: Core Tenets and Operational Concepts? report notes, it “conceptualizes what the Russian military should do to deter a war before it begins & for how it would fight a war against a militarily superior opponent.” The concept of active defence builds on decades of intellectual endeavour by the Russians and Soviets. As the report notes, “active defense has appeared in debates among leading military theorists since World War I and the Russian Civil War.”

General Gerasimov filled out the military role in active defence in his 2013 speech, “The Value of Science Is in the Foresight: New Challenges Demand Rethinking the Forms and Methods of Carrying out Combat Operations.” Yes, that really was the title. He foresaw Russia developing new and old means of warfare to achieve the aspirations of this new military strategy. What is fascinating, at least to me, is what aspects of their new forms of war we are NOT seeing to a significant degree in their invasion of Ukraine.

Cyber

First, cyber. Gerasimov describes how “new information technologies have enabled significant reductions in the spatial, temporal, and informational gaps between forces and control organs.” But it's not obvious, at this point, that Russia has been successful in this area.

One of the greatest shortfalls is that they have not been able to shutdown Ukraine’s telecommunications infrastructure. As the Monash @IP_Observatory notes, many cities retain a good proportion of pre-war connectivity.

The still functioning internet has allowed images & stories to be seen by a global audience. Ukrainian ability to keep its networks running has been an important foundation in their global influence campaign. We might have expected Russia to more successfully deny this.

There is another reason we have not ‘seen’ a lot of cyber ops in this war. As @Rid_T notes in his recent article “often the most damaging cyberoperations are covert and deniable by design.

“In the heat of war, it’s harder to keep track of who is conducting what attack on whom, especially when it is advantageous to both victim and perpetrator to keep the details concealed.” Cyber ops are happening, we just can’t see many of them.

And as @Kofman explains, “much hay has been made of Russian military thought on political or information warfare, but Gerasimov has always made clear that the thrust of military strategy is conventional and nuclear warfare.”

Command and Control

Second, we are not seeing unified command and control from the Russians. Gerasimov notes that “differences between strategic, operational, and tactical levels, as well as between offensive and defensive operations, are being erased.” This implies a more unified approach.

We are yet to see this from the Russians. Indeed, we see three different wars in the north, east and south. This is sloppy implementation of #strategy. As this CNN piece noted, who is the Russian theatre commander?

And as @MarkHertling writes in his good thread on this topic “a Theater CDR is the "Operational Artist" of a campaign…They know the political strategy, and they plan the sequence and execution of the operations so that the tactical battles achieve the political strategy.”

Human-machine teaming

A final thing we might have expected to see more of, given the amount of reporting on Russian capabilities, is human-machine teaming. The Russians have dozens of programs for autonomous recon and combat vehicles in the air, sea and land domains.

Expert, @Sam_Bendett, has examined Russian developments including the use of drone swarms. He notes that “Russian developments may present a challenge to Western forces’ quest to remain dominant in combat.”

n the early stages of the Russian campaign, we saw minimal use of these systems. However, in the past week this has begun to change, primarily in the air domain. One example was an armed UAV using Artificial Intelligence to pick a target used last week.

There are also reports now of the Russians using the Russian Orlan-10 drone. This is used by the Russian military for provide aerial reconnaissance of potential targets on the ground. So, we are starting to see some aerial systems being used by the Russians.

But there are no ground systems, such as their Uran-9 Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle or the Marker combat robot. Noting high casualties among Russian troops, and increasing urban operations, they may become attractive in the coming weeks.

Conclusion

Given the focus on Russian military theory, new equipment and ‘wonder weapons’ in the past decade, these are three capabilities we might have expected to see take more prominence in the Russian invasion.

That we are not leads us to reconsider the effectiveness of Russian military transformation. It also provides insights for all of us about developing an effective 21st century military organization.